The production and consumption of cultural villages in South Africa: a decolonial epistemic perspective

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Periodical article

Title:	The production and consumption of cultural villages in South Africa: a decolonial epistemic perspective
Author:	Ndlovu, Morgan
Year:	2013
Periodical:	Africanus (ISSN 0304-615X)
Volume:	43
Issue:	2
Pages:	51-63
Language:	English
Geographic term:	South Africa
Subjects:	tourism African culture Zulu
Abstract:	This article presents a case study of cultural villages in South Africa in general and of PheZulu Safari Park in particular. Cultural villages can be defined as purpose-built physical structures and socio-cultural displays that are primarily intended for visitation by tourists, and serve as museums that claim to represent the ethnic identities that existed or still exist in South Africa. While a number of scholars have highlighted neo-colonial tendencies in the manner in which the political economy and representations of cultural identities are ordered within the tourism setting of the Third World, the major problems with them are that: 1. they treat identity construction and political economy as separate rather than constitutive of each other; and 2. the neo-colonial tendencies are not treated as part of the broader, historical project of coloniality. The article demonstrates how a shift in the locus of enunciation changes our understanding of meaning of cultural villages from a Euro-modernist to a de-colonial perspective. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. [ASC Leiden abstract]